PhotographyBanzai.com

I went to a local convention called Kollision Con on Saturday for a few hours. Here are the results of my effort. I’ll be talking later about how that video was done. I set out to improve from my previous videos and I think I accomplished that. This time I ended up spending some money on the music along with more general effort on getting better source video clips.  So with that, the cost of the badge, and around 126 miles round trip… it wasn’t the cheapest event, but still less than staying at the hotel for a day or two. Photo highlights:  If you have any questions or comments, let me know through my contact page, thanks. 

I attended the Chicago Comic Con on Sunday. There really wasn’t much cosplay, but I managed to get a few photos. If I attend this event next year, I plan on going on Saturday because that should have more costumers and such to document. There are various well knows actors and actresses that attend so that they can interface with fans. A few highlight photos: There were not too many photos, so I tried to put a little extra effort into post-processing of each. The main technique I used in the convention center was to aim the flash toward the ground instead of directly at the cosplayer or up into nothingness of the tall celling. The negative with that is when I was too close, there was a noticeable difference in brightness of their lower body compared to their face.  I easily fixed that with the “graduated filter” tool in Adobe Camera Raw. Let’s see… besides that… The camera I was using was the K-7 with 31mm lens and Sigma flash. I did take a limited few photos with a 10-17mm fisheye ...

I finished going through the first day of photos from the Otakon 2011 convention in Baltimore, MD today. Some highlight images of the day: I primarily used the DA 40mm f2.8 lens for that day, switching between using and not using the flash. Overall the flash is a big help outside to create a level exposure between the subject and background, yet still having high contrast throughout the image.  The main benefit being that I don’t have to care as much if I shooting into or away from the sun or not. I decided to do cropping this time to see if the final results turn out a bit better overall. Getting decent framing is a challenge with prime lenses, but it is what I prefer.